"first rayracer on gfx card prod so thumbs up"
er, certainly not. i've seen some gpu-based raytracer in an intro (64k i think) back when ps2.0 was new, and half of the "high-tech" shaders people are doing nowadays involve some sort of raytracing. and there's also stuff like this, for example.

i'm really quite certain that there was some ps2.0 only raytracing intro (64k or 4k, don't remember) a few years back, but i don't remember the name - can anyone help?

that said, i know there's a snooker game that calculates exact intersection points+normals in the pixel shader to get nicer shading - again don't know the name, but it does get mentioned regularly on the directxdev ml when someone tries out perpixel lighting with spheres and wonders why they don't look perfectly round :)

.raytracing in shaders 2.0. Indeed, raytracing could be done in ps2.0, I actually did it myself (its somewhere in my web page), but not with shadows and reflections since you run out of instructions, while in ps3.0 you don't. You could even get this working at 40 fps at 800x600 anway in pure software. The prod was just a kind of "my hello world" experiment with sh3.0.

.raytracing in a shader not new. Of course it´s not. Anyway, very few demos (if any at all) do innovate in anything (technically) when compared to the cg community out there. We are always lagging behind them, so in this case it just happend again. Still, raytracing of spheres/planes/colinders is a classic on the demoscene

.unfinished prod. yes, I know, I don't care, and I will not finalize it. This prod is just a fast 4k, I had fun during the four days I spent on it.

.about the motrion blur you see in the video. Please do not thumb this prod up just for the mblur. The realtime exe doen't have the blur. BUT the realtime intro runs arround 90 fps, and it very well captures the fast movements that are synchronized to the muzik, while the 30 fps of the divx were not a high enought sampling rate to capture that movement. So I added the mblur to the avi so you at least figure out that the spheres actually move.

You forgot to put a text on the intro saying what you were doing, like.. 'Look! only 2 polys!', or something like that. As I knew what you were doing I was able to go to the orgos and let them read the readme before voting ;)

About raytracing in shaders; there is also "Fair play to the queen" by Candela that does shaders 3.0 raytracing on 3 metaballs.The shader is available in the data folder of the demo for anyone that wants to learn. For this prod you only have to use glIntercept of course.

JaK, we'll see. ANyway Fuzzion allready used the technique for their AO-in-4k.

Hi, apparently in x1600 graphics cards (and pressumably in x1400) the driver goes into software rendering mode. It's probably because of the amount of conditional branches in the driver (not really many, but well). I think ATI is hardcoding the two paths of a branch and then cmov()-ing or lerp()-ing the results, and that makes the shader huge. In my x1800 everything goes fine, probably because a bigger instruction count or because they have real branching capabilities in the x800 (??). It seems then to me that nvidia better supports the conditional branches.

I don't have a x1600 so I cannot start tuning the shader. I'm sorry...

bonzaj: yes, painting, putting the floor, the electricity... uf, this is going to be loong :(

Vista 64-bit (RC2) claims it's not a vaild Win32 application, hence I assumed .com or similar nasty tricks. Sorry. But this means that the packer is using behaviour that works by accident in XP/XP64, and is why I still think safemode exe should be included...